BLACK SEA lets visitors descend into the shallows of the ocean through generative video and sound synthesis in constant turbulence. A Eurorack synthesizer transforms the video audioreactively, and the sound arrives on phones as a stream via QR code.

The work follows Drexciya and their afrofuturist mythology of a subaquatic people descended from the women thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage. Glissant’s right to opacity is where I take my own bearings. What the sea holds stays unreadable, and the work keeps it that way.

Due to racist and particularly BIPoC-hostile reporting on alleged clan criminality, BLACK SEA was deliberately exhibited at Cologne’s Ebertplatz.